The annual Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Summit has established a blog carnival, and one of the subjects they are asking people to react to is “Where Does Content Start Or Marketing Begin…And Vice Versa?”

At CreativeFeed we believe that successful digital marketing — like all marketing — must focus on connecting with consumers. It’s easy to create a buzz by just making a lot of noise with some oddball content, but buzz always dies down fast. Creating an ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation between consumers and a brand is more of a challenge but infinitely more valuable.

Effective marketing today is all about conversation, and listening to this conversation is where marketing efforts/content creation should start. Companies should obviously pay attention to the blogs belonging to well-known influencers and the consumer review forums that pertain to the particular brand’s industry,plus check the chatter on Twitter and Technorati and subscribe to feeds from the meme aggregators like Reddit and Mixx as well as blog aggregator feeds focused on the brand’s target consumer groups. Listening to this conversation results in the kind of market knowledge that big firms pay dearly to obtain — a constantly evolving and highly accurate insight into why and how people are responding to the brand and its services.

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What kills good innovative marketing campaigns before they even have a chance to go live? Often it’s misguided ideas about control and the place a brand really has in consumers’ lives.

We need to ask ourselves, each and every time we come up with another brilliant concept for social/viral/user-generated content/engagement campaigns — “what’s in it for them?”

“Them” are the consumers, the people who you hope to captivate. And unless your brand is truly an essential part of peoples’ lifestyles (think Apple Computers or Harley Davidson) the hard truth is that consumers really aren’t interested in devoting chunks of their own time to talking about your products, bragging about what they bought from you, playing a flash game centered on your brand, decorating their desktops with your logo, or participating in any other brand-centered activity … unless we provide them with a compelling reason to do so.

Don’t think you can fool consumers with social networking plans that pretend to be meeting places but are really intended to get people talking only about the glories of your product, blogs filled with nothing but company news (and carefully monitored comment systems), or widgets that enable people to interact only with a brand rather than with each other. It’s not going to work and if you build it they will not come.
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“Big companies talk the talk when it comes to adapting to the digital age. But do they walk the talk? It’s difficult to reconcile their desire to be nimbler – and more responsive to their customers – with the fact that at big companies budgets are generally scheduled a year in advance.

What’s more, when consumers are increasingly driving the dialogue online about products and services it may be problematic for big companies to be part of the conversation when they deploy a top-down strategy. Arthur Ceria, founder and chief creative officer of CreativeFeed Network, says these sorts of business practices are fast becoming antiquated and may be deterring large enterprises from capitalizing on digital technologies.

Ceria has blogged about the need for big companies to think small if they want success in the digital world. He stresses that, for many large companies, process has started to infringe on creativity.

Big companies grappling with the Internet need to embrace a “sense of discovery,” said Ceria, who has worked with Cisco, Intel and Yahoo, among other major brands. A sense of mission and a sense of awareness are also crucial if big companies want to take advantage of the Web. I recently spoke with Ceria about why bigger is not better in the digital age – and how large enterprises need to change if they want to stay in the game.

I also chatted with Ceria about trends in Web design. Ceria, who has an MFA from Yale University with a focus on graphic design, says far too many companies still treat their Web sites like a “brochure,” rather than a living, breathing “organism” that is part of the company’s DNA.

Enjoy.”

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO ARTHUR’S PODCAST

In a recent article Ogilvy’s China digital guru Kaiser Kuo said that said Beijing 2008 is the world’s first web 2.0 Olympics. And he went on to write:

There’s ample irony, and for some perhaps a certain poetic justice, in this — that the capital city of a country so infamous for censoring the Internet should be the first to host the Games in the age of Internet video sharing, citizen journalism, social networking, of microblogging, and the myriad online services and tools that have empowered ordinary people. Significantly, Beijing 2008 will also be the first Olympics in which a sizeable percentage, if not an absolute majority, of those in the audience will have in their pockets or purses a device capable of sending text, pictures, and often even video around the world almost instantaneously.

Another irony is that all of those devices in peoples’ pockets are provoking huge headaches for mainstream media here in the US. …Read More…

Over at the Master New Media blog Robin Good has an interesting article about how brands can leverage the credibility of online personalities in a fair and open way.

Good says that The Brand Ambassador should be a “respected followed authority, a blogger or small publisher targeting a specific audience niche” and points out that having an ambassador can be a much more effective vehicle for marketing communication that the most expensive advertising campaign.

Snipped from Good’s article:

We do not trust brands anymore. We trust individuals: friendly, familiar authority figures with who we feel great affinity. These are the people we trust and those from which we would always welcome honest suggestions and tips, and when they are spontaneous or clearly disclosed even those of commercial nature.

When you get paid to be a sponsor, you are a passive vehicle sending off a message to an audience that has no way to respond, comment or talk back to you publicly. There are no checks and balances in place to verify your claims and credibility. You just get more popular and visible by selling yourself as a testimonial while you lose little or none of your credibility as everybody knows that it is all fake, staged, unreal.

The piece is well worth a read and — bonus! — Good has included some great photos too.

-Arthur

Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, is putting together a list of Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers at large enterprises.

In his post asking people to submit their names to the list Jeremiah says; “I’m often asked which companies have one of the two emerging roles, (companies love to benchmark against their peers) so I’ve decided to start a list, not only to back my research, but also for those wanting to show to their companies ‘hey this is starting to happen for real’.”

Jeremiah defines a Social Media Strategist as someone whose job is “to lead the internal charge, develops the program, gains resources, convinces management, and measures success”

The Community Manager’s “job is to primarily be a community advocate is a social media user, and is externally focused, they are primarily the face to the online community. As companies scale, I expect to see these types or roles appear often for each product group at larger companies, they often report directly to the strategist or at least have a dotted line.”

There’s another list for those of us, like CreativeFeed, specialize in managing the conversation for our clients.

- Arthur

Big business better think small if they expect success in the digital world. Corporate bureaucracy drains the life out of marketing campaigns. By the time everyone at the table has had their say, an innovative idea is generally transformed into yet another iteration of the same old safe thing. Then everyone wonders why their “new” blog/widget/forum/flash demo flopped and resolves never to do anything that inventive again.

Rather than dissect each new idea to death, adopt a start-up mentality when launching a new product or service. Since you’re basically starting from scratch, capitalize on this fresh slate. Startups aren’t afraid to be innovative, their mentality is all about risk taking, customer engagement and honestly. One can go after the competition full speed ahead without abandoning logic or taking undue risks. Rather than burn money on trial balloons like big companies, a must startup rely on deep knowledge of and consistent interaction with their market to decide what risks make sense.

Effective marketing today is all about conversation, and startups understand the power of conversation better than big enterprises. In a startup, senior management personnel talk directly to everyone in the company (and everyone can be forthright with executives), and everyone in a startup interacts directly with the company’s customers. That conversation results in a depth of market knowledge that big firms pay dearly to obtain. To get that startup buzz going strip away some organizational layers, connect directly with customers, talk to them not at them, respond to their needs, take some chances, have a little fun, and get passionate about your business again.

-Arthur